B.A. Tortuga's Blog, page 74

My Boys Touch Street Team!

Join the My Boys Touch Street Team

What happens when Kiernan Kelly, Sean Michael, Julia Talbot and BA Tortuga put their heads together and decide to cause trouble? That’s right, y’all. STREET TEAM!

*sparkles*

So, what in heaven is a street team?

A street team is a group of readers and bloggers and folks that want to help their favorite writers spread the word about books. Simple as that. How? Host one of us on your blog. Like the books online. Share covers. Give your honest reviews on Goodreads and Amazon and tweet about releases. Vote in contests.

Basically stuff y’all already do, but you get stuff!

What are the bennies of being on the MBT Street Team?

Ha!

Free books. Swag. ARCs. Access to a private Yahoo group where you can directly interact with Sean, Kiernan, Julia and BA, get your questions answered, and get involved in the crazy process that is writing life. See WIP ideas, get excerpts, cover reveals, and more. You get deleted scenes, book details, first chance to be a part of Release Tours.

How do I join?

Click here to join the My Boys Touch yahoo group.

Guest Blog: Julia Talbot -- What happens when two stories want to have the same title?

Hey, y’all! BA is letting me play today, and I want to tell you a story! Well, more like an anecdote.

I was writing along on my story for the bar anthology, Bar None, which comes out this month from Torquere. The 25th, in fact, and has Sean Michael, BA Tortuga, Kiernan Kelly and me! Woo. Anyhoo, the working title for my story was the Full Moon Bar.

Can you tell it’s shifters?

But then? I had this idea for a paranormal dating service. And Full Moon Dating: Aiden and Ben was born. It came out last month, and has been a great seller, going to number 8 on All Romance’s bestseller, and number 45 on Amazon in gay romance. Again with the woo.

http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=78_85&products_id=3965

When Aiden and Ben came along, though, I had a quandary. Which one should I change? I wanted Full Moon to be the dating service, so I thought on Seamus and Hugh from the bar story. What suited them?

So, I decided that it would be a blue moon before a bear shifter and a wolf shifter bonded over getting beat up by a lion, and Blue Moon bar was born. I loved the idea of a hotheaded wolf shifter and this happy go lucky bear bartender, and I have to tell y’all, it’s funny and hot. I won’t spoil you, but it left me howling when I re-read it.

So, that’s what happens when 2 stories want the same name. You let the boys fight it out, basing it all on who suits the title more. This way I got rid of the confusion and got at least one new series out of the deal!

Pretty good thing, if you ask me.

Thanks for hanging out, y’all!

XXOO

Julia Talbot

www.juliatalbot.com

Happy Labor Day, y'all!

I suppose I should get my brisket on the fire, huh?

(Also, where the HELL did August go?)

Oh, and Monday Mancandy for y'all.

Much love, y'all.

BA

Six Sentence Sunday: Weed and Feed (m/m, paranormal with Julia Talbot)

Cian groaned, keeping him close. “That’s right, Boone. Yours. I’ve never eaten a whole werewolf anyway.”

“No?” Jackson snorted. “You’re not working hard enough.”

 

***

 

This is coming in October in the Cereus: Training book. :D

Much love, y'all!

BA

What I Worked on this Week

Active Writing:

Cereus: Training (co-write with Julia) -- Weed and Feed -- the m/m/m/m has turned into a m/m, m/m.

Better as a Memory (m/m, cont) -- new Eat My Brain novel without deadline or publisher.

Beauty and the Butch (working title) -- f/f assassin piece for Ellora's Cave

Absinthe (co-write with Julia) -- m/m paranormal sequel to Moonshine

On hold:

m/m/f novel (co-write with Julia) -- fun, sexy menage. This one doesn't have a home or a deadline, so it keeps getting pushed back.

 

In edits/rewrites:

The Four Horsemen: Ace and Kitty: working on the rewrites

 

Next week's plan?

Finish up Weed and Feed. Outline the next Coke/Dillon book :D

 

Not too much different than last week, huh? 

 

Much love, y'all.
BA

What I'm Reading this Week

Finished Killing Time and Taken in Hand. Reading Alice in Deadland and Dead Clown Barbeque this week. :D

Zombies!

*ahem*

Much love, y'all.

BA

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KRISTI!!

It's my baby sister's birthday today.

She's old as dirt. (I'm WAY older, so that's to be expected). I was the person that held her in the back seat of the car on the way home from the hospital. I was the first person to make her laugh. We can fight like fiends -- and get totally nasty about it, but we usually make up.

Hell, I love her enough to introduce her to my tattoo artist. ;-)

Happy birthday, KK. I love you *this* much and I promise to share my color books with you.

*smooches*

BA

Wayback Wednesday -- Cut Bait

Cut Bait was my first 'BDSM' book (I use the term VERY lightly here).  I tried to be serious.

I did.

And I apologize profusely and immediately to all those authors who do it right...

 

Billy and Rick are just guys, live-in lovers who are pretty happy with the life they lead. So when Rick's sister goes into the sex toy business and asks her brother to help test out her products, things get a little hairy.

The boys are willing to try a few things, just for laughs, but they soon find out that adding some spice to their sex life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Can Billy and Rick convince Rick's sister that they like their life just as it is, or is it too late to cut bait and run?

Available at Torquere Press, Amazon, and All Romance Ebooks.

Guest Post -- Welcome Shira Glassman!

Y'all! I'd like to introduce Shira Glassman to you. :D

Hey there! Tell us a little about yourself — why did you start writing? What do you love to read?

I'm a violinist, and I'm a woman who loves stories. I adore vintage whodunits with outlandish solutions and intellectual detectives who are slightly detached from the mystery itself -- I own nearly everything Dame Agatha Christie ever wrote, and I also love Doyle, Asimov's little short-story mysteries, and was blown away by Sayers' Gaudy Night. (Whodunit and feminist romance in the same place? YES, PLEASE.) But I also love the richness of Watership Down, the suspense, Nazi-fighting, scheming, and twists of The Odessa File, and principles and older man-younger woman dynamic of Jane Eyre.

I write because I love to make up new things. When I love something, I want to roll around in it, and writing is the best way I can think of to do that. When I hate something, I want to soothe myself, so sometimes I can think of a way to "fix it" in my writing. I also write because there are stories I wish existed, but they don't already. I want to see same-sex couples getting to be dignified and beautiful in fantasy stories or historical settings like opposite-sex couples do, with a BBC piano soundtrack in the background or a Rogers and Hammerstein score. I want to see the older, fatter, bearded man get the girl because I'm tired of feeling even gayer than I already am when I read or watch heterosexual love stories--the man is inevitably never my type.

What was the inspiration for The Second Mango? Why did you choose that title?

Driving in my car one day, Michael Kamen's main title music for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came on the stereo. I immediately pictured a blonde woman on a horse, riding a galloping horse toward another woman, who was tied up in a tent and needed rescuing. I didn't know who they were, other that initially, they were supposed to be into each other. It was only years later, when I was thinking about the way straight women often cross-dress in historical fiction or fantasy for reasons other than gender identity, that I realized that it would be really interesting to show someone like that interacting with a real live lesbian, as opposed to the "oh, whoops, I didn't realize you weren't a boy!" romances they sometimes wind up in. Having them not be a couple meant that I needed to go in search of another lesbian or bisexual woman for the gay one to snuggle with--so that meant, so did they!

Also, I grew up feeling very protective of dragons because of being inundated with fairy-tales where they were the very maligned bad-guys. My dragon is the dragon I've loved all my life.

The title refers to a scene in Chapter Three where the queen gives her new bodyguard one of the mangoes she had initially bought for herself at the market. It's a symbol of both of them opening up to each other--these two very different women who both badly need friends they can feel are family.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I used to want to write film scores. Writing these Mango novels seems to scratch that itch, though.

What's up next for you? What are you writing now?

I finished the first two books in the Mangoverse series before making my initial pitch, so I need to get book two, Climbing the Date Palm, cleaned up for my official submission. It's a rescue story, where Queen Shulamit And Crew help a male/male couple who have gotten embroiled in a labor rights nightmare--workers not being properly paid, etc. I've also started a third book in the series, so that's what I'm working on right now. It's a whodunit about a series of thefts, with the queen as detective.

Ultimate dessert?

I'm not really into dessert in general, but I do want to give a gigantic shout-out to Gville Sweets, a local baker who's got lovely gluten-free raspberry cheesecake bites (they're shaped kind of like cupcakes or tarts, and that's just about as much sweet-at-once as I can handle.) I'm notorious for turning up my nose at sweets -- usually preferring something along the lines of lambchops or raw arugula -- but from the first moment I sank my teeth into the sweet, tangy, rich little morsel I longed to give one to my protagonist, who can't eat wheat. We'd bought them for my spouse, on whom my protagonist's digestive problem is based, but I loved them so much that I went back to the store the next day and bought myself a package just for myself, so I wouldn't feel like I was stealing her sweets! I contacted the man behind the magic and let him know he has the endorsement of a fictional character, and I'm going to see if I can finagle our tables to be close together at Pride (although that's unlikely, because the food is usually all in the same place.)

How can we find you? 

http://www.facebook.com/ShiraGlassman
http://shiraglassman.wordpress.com author blog - so far it's been all Mangoverse content without filler
http://shiraglassman.tumblr.com - Mangoverse content plus intersectional feminism, dragons, LGBTQ rights, and the occasional "delicious older man alert, woo!" post.

The Second Mango
by Shira Glassman; available from Prizm Books and Amazon!

Queen Shulamit never expected to inherit the throne of the tropical land of Perach so young. At twenty, grief-stricken and fatherless, she's also coping with being the only lesbian she knows after her sweetheart ran off for an unknown reason. Not to mention, she's the victim of severe digestive problems that everybody think she's faking. When she meets Rivka, an athletic and assertive warrior from the north who wears a mask and pretends to be a man, she finds the source of strength she needs so desperately.

Unfortunately for her, Rivka is straight, but that's okay -- Shulamit needs a surrogate big sister just as much as she needs a girlfriend. Especially if the warrior's willing to take her around the kingdom on the back of her dragon in search of other women who might be open to same-sex romance. The real world outside the palace is full of adventure, however, and the search for a royal girlfriend quickly turns into a rescue mission when they discover a temple full of women turned to stone by an evil sorcerer.

Authors After Dark 2013

Y'all... There's so much to tell.

Savannah has big boats.

And there are amazing signs.

There's the fact that Just Like Cats and Dogs won the Bookie for Best GLBT Novel of the Year.

And Julia won Best Ebook Only Bookie

There's the boobie war between Kiernan Kelly and Jade Lee.

There's the fact that I can make Joey W. Hill laugh so hard she can't see.

There's the hugs -- OMG. 

There's the folks -- and I'm not going to list them because then I'll forget somebody and hurt their feeling and I hate that, but I saw old friends, made new friends. 

I brought books.

And redneck wine glasses.

I wore my wolf slippers AND my Star Wars pants.

AND my tutu.

It was a perfect con, honestly, and I love Stella and her crew more than words can say. I'm ready for next year already.

But really, when you ask me about AAD2013, for the rest of my life, what I'll tell you is:

SHE SAID YES!